An analysis of night time cooling based on NCDC station record data

Climate science is all about surface temperature trends. The problem with this is that the CAGW is a rate of cooling problem, not a static temperature problem. Is Co2 changing the rate of cooling, thereby altering the expected surface temperature, are the hypothesized positive feedbacks actually there, are there any actual measurements of these parameters. I think there is. Every night the Sun sets on every location on Earth, and the surface starts to cool by radiating heat into the cold black of space. What can weather station data tell us about this?

Figure 2 Count of NCDC Daily station records by year (2011 is partial year)

The temperature record has daily min and max temperatures. When the Sun comes up in the morning, on most days it warms the surface from the minimum temp of the day peaking late in the afternoon. Then the Sun sets and temperatures start to plummet. I live at 41 N Lat, and on a clear night the temperature will drop 20-30 F (Figure 1), over a degree F per hour. If there’s a CO2 effect in the temperature record, it should show up in night time cooling. The question is, does this loss of cooling actually show up in the data?

I went in search of an answer, I started with NCDC’s global summary of day’s data set which contains over 120 million station records, and starts late 1929. The first thing to notice is how few samples there are each year prior to 1973 (Figure 2).

What I wanted to look at is how much the temperature went up “today”, and how much does it drop “tonight”. Today’s Rising temp is today’s T-max –today’s T-min. Falling temp is today’s T-max – tomorrows T-min, the drop in temp over night. Difference is Rising – Falling.

To do this, you have to have good records for both today and tomorrow, so as part of my data import process, I validate that the temperature records are good. NCDC provides placeholder values for temp, even when the data isn’t available, I trap these and remove them. This leaves me with a set of data as it is from NCDC, augmented with Rise, Fall, and Diff (Figure 3). The NCDC data also contains some station information, Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, Country, and State where appropriate. This allows me to aggregate temperature records by station location, as well as create a google map of the station in a aggregate set. When annual averages are generated, I average the daily values for a particular station, then average the annual values of the collections of stations in the area being examined.

This is where the temperature data would be homogenized. I feel that since temperatures are not linear spatially and the sample size changes so much over time, homogenizing temperature data is basically making up data that doesn’t exist. I understand some might say not doing this creates a bias where the data is over sampled, I feel making up data is worse than bias.

Lastly I ran a report on the Continental US since it has a large number of stations, the graph is just of diff without a multiplier (Figure 9).

Figure 9 Diff for Continental US

I can also generate daily average reports, Here’s the daily average for stations North of 23 Lat 1950 to 2010 Diff * 100 (Figure 10).

Figure 10 Daily diff * 100 1950-2010 for > 23 Lat

When the ratio of Day to night increases, Diff is positive. When the ratio decreases Diff is negative. This is really a graph of temperature response to a change in incoming solar energy. I’ve read comments that said: “Boy it’d be nice to turn the Sun off for a while to measure the response”, will this is the next best thing to doing exactly that. The question I had from this graph, is what’s the slope of changing Diff as the day gets longer (Figure 11), and as the day get shorter (Figure 12)? So I created the following:

Figure 11 May to September cooling rate: Summer slope

Figure 12 November to March warming rate: Winter slope

If you plot out the slope of the daily temperature change for spring to fall and fall to spring you get this (Figure 13).

Figure 13 Slope of Spring to Fall and Fall to Spring temperature response as the length of day changes for >23 Lat

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough data to see if it truly is a ~60-70 year cycle, but it clearly shows that the slope for both the cooling and warming decreased, where the winter warming slope is both larger and changed more than the summer cooling slope. I would expect a Co2 signal to decrease the cooling slope, which we have, I wouldn’t expect it to decrease the warming slope as well.

What would affect both? A change in Orbit or tilt comes to mind, as does a change in Sea Surface Temps, but would SST’s change both? A change in cloud cover might change both.

What will be interesting to see is as we collect more data, does slope continue to go back up, detecting a natural cycle affecting cooling rates.

In any rate, the data shows Rise and Fall being very consistent over the entire data set, where diff seems to be negatively correlated to temperature increases, when it warms up, it cools a little more overnight. Which makes some sense, and if the heat that’s radiated into space is air warmed over warm ocean waters, which then moves over land, it makes even more sense.

Conclusion:

The world wide surface station measured average daily rising temp and falling temp is 17.465460F/17.465673F for the period of 1950 to 2010, not only is the falling temperatures slightly larger than rising temperatures, 17.4F is only 50%-70% of a typical clear sky temperature swing of 25F to 30F, which can be as large as +40F depending on location and humidity.

This shows conclusively that the average night time cooling is not limited by GHG because low humidity clear skies cool far more than the global average. Since recorded Min Max temperatures show no sign of a loss of cooling on a daily basis since at least 1950, even if CO2 has increased the amount of DLR, something else(most likely variablity of clouds) is controlling temperatures. This would seem to eliminate CO2 as the main cause of late 20th century warming.

110 thoughts on “An analysis of night time cooling based on NCDC station record data”

There is another mechanism that drives the nocturnal cooling, new built constructions that cause wind turbulence, this would decrease the rate of forming of the ground inversion at night, while mixing warmer air aloft with the cooling ground boundary layer. This obviously decreases the cooling rate.

So the more vertical constructions, the warmer the night. There was an artical about that.

Interesting approach. Just to be a pedant though, ‘Every night the Sun sets on every location on Earth, and the surface starts to cool by radiating heat into the cold black of space’
It doesn’t set at the poles in summer.

Low humidity skies cool faster than high humidity ones because of the latent heat of condensation of the water. CO2 has no such property at earth conditions so would tend to help cool the surface. (Unless you believe in the GHE).
Deserts heat faster and cool faster, getting hotter and cooler than rainforest at the same latitude.

Good to have this subject getting some attention. Having lived and worked in Namibia and Saudi Arabia and other desert regimes I’ve long been aware of significant night time cooling. Have suggested before that just one thermometer recording minimums in a remote desert region should give a fairly good idea of any long term warming, or not.

Agree with ‘Bloke down the pub’ all the mechanisms I have read regarding climate temperature control mechanism seem to have a low latitudes bias. The obvious one is the standard GHE explanation that takes the earth as a flat disc, but many of the non-CO2 controlled ones also suffer from this issue.
I live above 51N, at these latitudes the days vary considerably from winter to summer as does the solar input. The temperature is controlled to large extent by sea temperature and wind direction. (If it blows from the north it is cold, etc.). I am reminded of talking to a friend who had lived in Arizona all his life and thought the idea that the temperature can go UP at night some how quiet bizarre. So I believe that the surface temperature is just a proxy for the prevailing weather and ocean currents. As these can vary over very long periods a 30 year averaging into ‘climate’ does not make sense, this particulary applies to the poles where half of the year there is virtually no direct solar input and most of the heat loss and gain comes from wind and sea.

Interesting though that the dreaded CO2 yet again fails to explain the observed effects.

The Alexander 2006 paper claimed :
“Over 70% of the global land area sampled showed a significant decrease in the annual occurrence of cold nights and a significant increase in the annual occurrence of warm nights. Some regions experienced a more than doubling of these indices. This implies a positive shift in the distribution of daily minimum temperature throughout the globe. Daily maximum temperature indices showed similar changes but with smaller magnitudes.”

What they seem to have done was just count the number of times per year the minimum temperature fell within the bottom 10% of a long trem seasonal average. If correct then your result would have also show a similar trend. Apparently it doesn’t.

When I first did this, I was surprised at how equal Rise and Fall were, that was why I did the hemispheric daily runs, looking for seasonable differences, and after see it was really there, was sort of shocked at how close they were. I ran a query (I did this all is sql) where I summed Rise and Fall, they were like 4 million degree’s, and the difference was only like 17.

@Bloke :) How about they just have longish days?

Let me also add, the data was NCDC’s Global Summary of Days set, and if any one wants my code just ask.

….Is it true to say that when the air temperature is hotter than the ground the ground can not radiate it’s heat away?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No, you are mixing up the concepts of convection and radiation.

An object that is above absolute zero radiates period. The net energy flux (looking at the macro picture) will be from the hotter to the cooler object. That is what the Second Law of thermo is saying.

Interesting approach. Just to be a pedant though, ‘Every night the Sun sets on every location on Earth, and the surface starts to cool by radiating heat into the cold black of space’
It doesn’t set at the poles in summer.

Low humidity skies cool faster than high humidity ones because of the latent heat of condensation of the water. CO2 has no such property at earth conditions so would tend to help cool the surface. (Unless you believe in the GHE).
Deserts heat faster and cool faster, getting hotter and cooler than rainforest at the same latitude.”

Humid areas have relatively cooler days and warmer nights, with a net overall warming.

Nice work, Mike.
This is a fine way of demonstrating that no additional heat has been trapped in the period analysed, and that the theoretical delayed radiation to space from increased levels of CO2 is a non-issue.
In fact, it is so obvious a test that it’s amazing no one thought of doing it before spending billions on fancy models to try to prove the reverse.
If the small rise in temperature in recent times were the result of “trapped” heat, this should be reflected in reduced cooling overnight, and you have shown that it is not the case.
It will be interesting to see how the warmists try to rationalise this withering piece of evidence.

@Clive: I’ve seen those reports as well, and you can see it in some of the Min/Max charts, looks the strongest in NH. It seems what they forgot to note is that the Max temps went up almost as much as the Min.

In general this doesn’t explain any temperature increases, and if you look at diff compared to max temp, diff tends to run negative (night time temp drops more than it went up the day before). If I had to guess, I’d agree with Edwin and say it’s driven by winds coming from the Oceans/Seas.

“I would expect a Co2 signal to decrease the cooling slope, which we have, I wouldn’t expect it to decrease the warming slope as well.”

Considering a large portion of the Sun’s output is IR, CO2 acting as an insulator (by virtue of indiscriminant re-emission of IR effecting net transfer) there’s no reason it shouldn’t work both ways. Slowing Earth’s cooling as well as slowing the Sun’s warming of the Earth. In other words, any possible enhancement of the Greenhouse Effect could be a wash, making it a little warmer at night and a little cooler during the day.

Interesting approach. Just to be a pedant though, ‘Every night the Sun sets on every location on Earth, and the surface starts to cool by radiating heat into the cold black of space’
It doesn’t set at the poles in summer.

It depends on how you define day.
==========================================
No it depends on how you define “night”. :-)
If night is the period between sunset and sunrise, then the original quote is correct – every night the sub does set on every location – it’s just that nights don’t come once every 24 hours in polar latitudes, they can last for months.

5.147* 10^14 sq meters*240 joules/sec/sq meter *8.64*10^4 secs/day= 1.067*10^22 joules per day radiated away
1.067*10^22/1.288*10^24 = 0.83%.
So the atmosphere as a whole cools by less than 1% over the course of a day. That figure makes sense when you figure that the earth’s surface temperature may change by 10 C or more overnight far more than average changes over a week, but weather patterns persist for several days, and that’s why meteorologists can predict daily highs out a week or so. That cooling is obviously mostly from the
earth’s surface and air near the surface ,leaving most of the atmosphere unchanged.

With an average temp of 287 K, that 0.83% would imply an average cooling of 2.4C overnight, way less than Mike Crows 11C min cooling at night.
Either the cooling of at higher latitudes is balanced by negligible cooling over much wider areas near the equator, or surface temps can fluctuate much more than atmospheric temps-quite likely since on a clear night a significant percentage of surface radiation can escape directly to space without being blocked by greenhouse gases.

@Bob, I’m inclined to not dismiss the physics of Co2 photon absorption/radiation. That said for whatever reason it doesn’t show up in the temperature record as a loss of cooling.

I’ve become interested in using an IR thermometer to measure the sky’s temp. On a 35F clear day it measured ~-40F. 35F has very little water vapor, so I think it’s getting close to measure GHG DLR. -40F is about 160w/sq m. So what I expect to see is a doubling will increase the -40, how that changes surface temps will depend on clouds and water vapor.

How does the Time of Observation (TOB) affect your calculations? As I understand it, sometimes the Tmax or Tmin does not occur at the times expected (i.e., off by a day from expectation, due to, say, a front coming through that makes all temperatures on one day higher or lower than all temps on the previous day). Is there a record of TOB associated with each station so that you could test whether it makes any difference?

Why don’t you expect the supposed CO2 GHE to not affect the warming rate in the mornings? It should increase the warming rate if the GHE actually exists since it absorbs and reradiates LW energy back to the surface. According to the GHE theory, that would increase the rate of surface warming.

In fact, if the GHE really existed, then the rate of nighttime cooling, under identical conditions of wind, clouds and humidity, must increase as CO2 concentrations increase. You have demonstrated that there is no measurable change in either the nighttime cooling or daytime warming rates with respect to the increasing CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere.

Net heat transfer is from warm to cold. The rate of that heat transfer can be slowed or accelerated with an intervening material (low conductor such as a vacuum to high conductor such as a metal rod), but that will show up in the cooling rate of the warmer object. A colder object cannot heat a warmer object! That requires the introduction of additional energy into the “system”.

@Lance Wallace, No there’s no TOB info in the data. I approached this from the point of view that Non Weather related biases would be all similar for a single station, and the weather related ones would be random and not very common. If you look at the daily graph you can really see “Weather”.

Radiation is “line-of-sight” and “speed of light” so you would expect that any “slowing down” of energy lost to space will be through slower processes such as rates of convection, evaporation, condensation, and freezing. The daily minimum temperature is usually the dew point (or frost point) temperature, which is a measure of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. I’ve been doing energy and mass balances using data for the Southpole where days are a year long and it is the dryest place on earth. I find that water vapor at these very low level is statistically more significant than any CO2 effect. At the Southpole in the night time, there is a strong inversion ( air is warmer than the ice surface). The CO2 is being delivered to the surface from the upper atmosphere. In this situation, most of the radiation from CO2 will be lost to space rather than to the surface. Thus, one might expect CO2 to enhance energy lost to space. The CO2 is getting it’s energy through collisions with air molecules, not from radiation from the surface.

A fundamental finding, backed by a huge volume of data, processed in a way that not only minimizes arbitrary choices of the author, but also cancels out the numerous “adjustments” and “enhancements” of the NCDC. Congratulations.

@R Taylor, That was what I trying to accomplish. I spend a lot of time doing astrophotography, and experienced the large drop in temp after the Sun set. I also work with databases, and have experience with simulators, the whole topic is a nice fit.

My take home from all this is as Mike Crow is pointing out it is a TIME function. Water (and CO2 maybe?) changes the rate of warming during the day and cooling during the night so the net effect is to LOWER day time temperatures and RAISE night time temperatures. The one set of data I looked at (see comments above) showed that water vapor had the net effect of overall cooling not warming but I did not do an exhaustive study as John Christy did.

However theoretically an increase in water vapor in the atmosphere should result in a net decrease in temperature since it is absorbing incoming sunlight and sending some of it back into space when it re-radiates.

The physics that applies to CO2 and earthshine also applies to H2O and sunshine. Therefore if H2O is causing a net warming then CO2 should cause a net cooling.

I don’t know how many readers have there own temperature recording stations, but mine show a very similar pattern as found in the article, this is just one small station within the CET area but my T/max and T/min follow the same general trend of overall temperatures, when they increase so do T/max and T/min and vice versa. As you know CET has been dropping rapidly recently, along with my own T/max and T/min, in fact T/min has dropped more than T/max recently. If T/min is the one affected by C02 then this part of the world doesn’t know about it. It would be interesting if any other independent recorders out there confirm these findings I think there is a lot of useful information to be gained from one off sites. They my not conform to the best sites around, but they do pick up useful trends. Mine may be in this category but it does closely follow CET.

My own suspicion is that the effect of CO2 at the densities we’re talking about may very well be a small phase change rather than an amplitude change. This would not show up if one only looks at min/max. It would only show up as a slight delay in the occurrence of the minimum temperature and/or the max temperature.

Of course since the effect would be dwarfed by normal daily variations it would be hard to isolate.

@JCrew, As I mentioned I want to start logging the IR temp of the sky. Other than that I’m not sure. I originally built it to process stations by Lat and Lon, I recently added by country. I did that to look for the large spike in the early 70’s (present in most of Northern Eurasia station readings). I’m also looking at trying to identify just clear sky deserts, which I think define the limits of cooling. But I’m doing the second because I didn’t want to be accused of cherry picking the data.

@fhhaynie, I think the min temp limit doesn’t have to be the dew point or frost line. I’ve watched it cool through both dew point and then frost line, and continue until the Sun comes up. But if you’ve noticed roads, exposed dirt, bricks don’t have frost, it’s because they’re still too warm, at the same time the cars and grass were covered. But I was impressed at the amount of heat that had to be lost to wring all of that water out of the air, and then freeze it.

Oh, one more thing I wanted to add to this thread. NCDC included almost the same set of station CRU uses (at least for the same years data). As you can see from the sample size, the early years are very under sampled, and therefore any homogenized temperature data is also based on is IMO suspect.

Is this just an artifact of the number of stations? The station count jumps at that time too.

If not it is the most significant factor and needs to be focused on. My gut feel, even on first sight was that it’s a glitch, not climate.

I don’t know if you noticed my comment on the spike, but it’s prevalent in the individual aggregate reports for Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and China for that period. I’m not sure what it’s source is, it would be interesting to locate the source of the co2 spike to see if they’re in the same location.

bof
The idea seemed me good in the begining. But after fig 3 and the remark : “Diff is very small, and to make it more than a flat line, it is multiplied by a constant (in this case 365)”, I wondered.
(A)GW is all about 2K / century rise of temp, that is less 2/36500 K per night variation in cooling (or not). I really doubt that available data can show such minuscule trend : 0,00005 K/day.
Your methodology is ingenious and could work, but it doesn’t.
Nice try, thought.

GLEFAVE commented on An analysis of night time cooling based on NCDC station record data.
in response to geoarmstrong:

From my EE viewpoint:
My own suspicion is that the effect of CO2 at the densities we’re talking about may very well be a small phase change rather than an amplitude change. This would not show up if one only looks at min/max. It would only show up as a slight delay in the occurrence of the minimum temperature and/or the max temperature.
Of course since the effect would be dwarfed by normal daily variations it would be hard to isolate.

This basic thought lead to the slope analysis on the daily change in response to changes in the length of day. Which does show up, but it shows up in both the warming and cooling trends.

I did want to expose this work, to get the thoughts of others to see where it can lead.

About dew point. Radiation from a surface is at the skin surface temperature. When dew is formed on the surface, the surface will be at that temperature. As moisture is taken out of the air, the dew point will be lowered. At the Southpole, the surface is ice and the reported skin surface temperature closely matches the reported frost point temperature. The air temperature measured above the surface is slightly higher. I noticed in your Fig. 1 that around 4:00 am the temperature leveled off. What was the reported dew point at that time?

“the hypnotized [hypothesized] positive feedbacks …”
“The question I had from this graph, is what’s the slope of changing Diff and [as?] the day get’s [gets] longer (Figure 11), and [as] the day get shorter (Figure 12)?”

“the hypnotized [hypothesized] positive feedbacks …”
“The question I had from this graph, is what’s the slope of changing Diff and [as?] the day get’s [gets] longer (Figure 11), and [as] the day get shorter (Figure 12)?”

Since I can’t edit the page, If a mod can make these changes, I’d be fine with it.

“the hypothesized positive feedbacks”
“The question I had from this graph, is what’s the slope of changing Diff as the day gets longer (Figure 11), and as the day gets shorter (Figure 12)?”

Question from an uneducated layman; if a parcel of air warms at the surface, it expands, rises, and cools. Where did the absorbed heat energy go? I say it was shared with the cooler air above, not lost at all. I read that nitrogen, oxygen and argon do not radiate at temperatures encountered in the atmosphere. So how does 99.9% of the atmosphere cool down once it has been warmed?

MiCro says:
@John West,
Incoming solar is mostly in the .5-1u range, the nearest Co2 band is a little over 4u and a small absorption at about 3.5u. Solar IR should pass through Co2 untouched…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The problem is the IPCC and it’s definitions of ‘forcings’

If you look at the IPCC causes of warming/climate change you will notice that WATER is conspicuous by it’s absence. See Table In AR5 from WUWT link

A physical chemist, Rich, explains why water, one of the most important forces in the climate, is not considered a ‘forcing’ and instead is considered a ‘ feedback’

The Spectrum of Water Vapor

Water is an extremely important and also complicated greenhouse gas. Without the role of water vapor as a greenhouse gas, the earth would be uninhabitable. Water is not a driver or forcing in anthropogenic warming, however. Rather it is a feedback, and a rather complicated one at that. The amount of water vapor in the air changes in response to forcings (such as the solar cycle or warming owing to anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide). This change in water vapor concentration leads to positive and negative feedback mechanisms because of its role as a greenhouse gas, but also because of the role of liquid and solid aerosols (clouds), the effect of on the heat capacity of the air, and the influence of water phase transitions….http://how-it-looks.blogspot.com/2010/03/infrared-spectra-of-molecules-of.html

Therefore if you look at temperature changes caused by anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide then you have to lump the effects of water into the mix.

NOTE: I consider CO2 the feedback since oceans occupy 70% of the earth’s surface. Solar energy has the greatest effect on the ocean (link 1,link 2)and Henry’s Law means a change in the temperature of the ocean from a change in solar energy (NASA link) will change the amount of CO2 uptake or outgassing. link

I have a suggestion (really, a plea to you and all other authors) which is relevant to the presentation, but not to its scientific content. Please do not use bitmaps in jpeg format for presenting charts and graphs! The figures are (a) difficult to read and (b) ugly as sin. Please use a lossless bitmap format: I strongly recommend png. Line drawings will look much, much better.

You can use jpeg if you wish, but if you do, use a lossless compression version of jpeg.

bof
The idea seemed me good in the begining. But after fig 3 and the remark : “Diff is very small, and to make it more than a flat line, it is multiplied by a constant (in this case 365)”, I wondered.
(A)GW is all about 2K / century rise of temp, that is less 2/36500 K per night variation in cooling (or not). I really doubt that available data can show such minuscule trend : 0,00005 K/day.
Your methodology is ingenious and could work, but it doesn’t.
Nice try, thought.

I appreciate this comment, though I’m not sure there still isn’t value to this. When you look at the overall average of all of the temperature records(Rise/Fall), it’s still slightly negative. So IMO either the records are accurate enough to be used to show a temperature trend, and therefore Diff is slightly negative, or it isn’t good for either purpose.

Also I process the data on the paired days (today’s min/max and tomorrows min) on each station, then aggregate multiple stations together. So while the reading are recorded in tenths of a degrees, each record has to be larger by at least a tenth of a degree to show any difference. Now you might argue that tenths of a degree still isn’t accurate enough, but as I said above the data is either good for both, or it’s not.

” The AERI data record demonstrates that the downwelling infrared radiance is decreasing over this 14-yr period in the winter, summer, and autumn seasons but it is increasing in the spring; these trends are statistically significant and are primarily due to long-term change in the cloudiness above the site. ”

Also, is there information on cloudiness in the data (I just skimmed the article). Seems like it would be better to eliminate cloudy nights to get better data.

Mathematicians have a sense of ‘beautiful’ work. Elegant, concise, persuasive.
What you have done is beautiful. And very important. Amazing that it has not previously been done.
A suggestion for a companion analysis concerning the magnitude of the positive water vapor feedback. If specific humidity (calculable from relative humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure) can be estimated for a large sample of stations where it fundamentally is different (e.g. Arizona, Florida) then the same rise/ fall/ diff analysis across varying atmospheric water vapor over time would shed light on the magnitude of the feedback. Would only be partial, since UTH is the most import factor and this analysis would only be for surface levels. Worth a though.

Also, is there information on cloudiness in the data (I just skimmed the article). Seems like it would be better to eliminate cloudy nights to get better data.

The NCDC doesn’t indicate level of cloud cover. I originally wanted to mine the data for this, but decided it would reduce the validity of the answer I get, we don’t like it when the team picks out the data they like. Now, it’s not to say that as an addition to this work, mining subsets wouldn’t have additional value.

Rud Istvan says:
May 17, 2013 at 10:10 am

Mathematicians have a sense of ‘beautiful’ work. Elegant, concise, persuasive.
What you have done is beautiful. And very important. Amazing that it has not previously been done.
A suggestion for a companion analysis concerning the magnitude of the positive water vapor feedback. If specific humidity (calculable from relative humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure) can be estimated for a large sample of stations where it fundamentally is different (e.g. Arizona, Florida) then the same rise/ fall/ diff analysis across varying atmospheric water vapor over time would shed light on the magnitude of the feedback. Would only be partial, since UTH is the most import factor and this analysis would only be for surface levels. Worth a though.

Thanks You!
I did recently look at the data to see if there was insight to be found, and it’s maybe, humidity is recorded only once per day.
For Christmas, like what Keith Gordon has, I asked for a simple weather station, in part so I could get a better understanding of how temp and humidity vary related to fixed time measurements that lack physical insight (no one is looking at what the weather is vs what the data that’s being recorded says).

Is there any evidence for “catastrophic” global warming other than climate models? When actual observations are analyzed, there is nothing to be alarmed about. Time will tell us whether recent warming was just another natural event (like the 30s) or actual mild warming due to CO2. In the meantime, Mike, keep up the honest questioning. If alarmists can’t come up with good answers to counter your research, they will try to Cook your goose by claiming 97% disagree with you. But eventually, they will just end up eating “Crow.”

@Louis, lol
There’s basically 2 arguments,
The data isn’t detailed enough to detect the change and/or there bias due to not homogenizing spacial locations.
As a data specialist (I do this for a living), homogenizing non-linear temps over a linear area is just making up data (and can be shown to be wrong by looking at temp data across a few different local stations, Try Cleveland and the surrounding area), especially when sampling changes over time, and that’s exactly what happened with the temperature record. It’s also why I did the Diff report on the US, as it’s arguably the most sampled area on the planet, to help reduce the bias from not homogenizing the data.

Another thing, if you haven’t looked at any of the google maps (link by most of the area graphs), I think the North Pole/Arctic is worth the effort, note that none of the stations are actually in the middle of the ice, almost all of them are on the coasts, though I’m not sure how they adjust them as the ice melts and regrows over the year.

That was what I originally went to get, but the hourly data I found wasn’t free. After thinking about it, decided that using Min/Max could work.
I went and took a look at some of the data, this could be a decent place to start for a next step.

I cannot understand why the average of the daily temperature increases compared to the average of the daily temperature decreases is of much significance. It seems to me that if you add up all of the daily temperature changes (both increases and decreases), you have to get the difference between the starting temperature and the ending temperature. Does this mean that you can find the difference between the averages by merely dividing the difference between the starting and ending temperatures by the number of days without bothering to even consider what the temperatures were in between? If so, why bother?

I cannot understand why the average of the daily temperature increases compared to the average of the daily temperature decreases is of much significance. It seems to me that if you add up all of the daily temperature changes (both increases and decreases), you have to get the difference between the starting temperature and the ending temperature. Does this mean that you can find the difference between the averages by merely dividing the difference between the starting and ending temperatures by the number of days without bothering to even consider what the temperatures were in between? If so, why bother?

It’s today’s increase minus tonight’s decrease. Since tomorrow morning will not be the same temperature as this morning there’s a difference.
But I think it’s important to actually calculate how much it cools over night, this is the period that Co2 has to affect if it’s changing the planet. Average temp is a lousy proxy for the “Co2” effect.

Considering a large portion of the Sun’s output is IR, CO2 acting as an insulator (by virtue of indiscriminant re-emission of IR effecting net transfer) there’s no reason it shouldn’t work both ways. Slowing Earth’s cooling as well as slowing the Sun’s warming of the Earth. In other words, any possible enhancement of the Greenhouse Effect could be a wash, making it a little warmer at night and a little cooler during the day.”

It DOES work both ways, but once there’s enough CO2 in the atmosphere already to absorb the 5% on so of the sun’s radiation in the CO2 range, adding additional CO2 will only increase the greenhouse effect, not augment the zero greenhouse effect .

For an atmosphere that absorbs all radiation from both the earth and the sun,
with a 1 layer atmosphere,, the sun sends X watts per square unit to the atmosphere
The atmosphere absorbs 2X units , X from the sun and X from the earth’s surface,
and radiates 2X units, X units back to space, X units back to the earth’s surface
The earth absorbs X units from the atmosphere, radiates X units back to the atmosphere.
So the net effect of the surface warming from an infrared absorbing atmosphere is the same as the effect of NO atmosphere.

Adding another absorbing layer to the atmosphere will still have no effect, so adding CO2 to the atmosphere will have a zero effect on surface radiation from the sun- that fraction can be ignored- only the fraction absorbed by the atmosphere from earth’s surface need be considered.

The atmosphere of Titan is transluctant to some wavelengths, and translucent to part of the surface radiation.
Suppose Titan receives X watts per square unit from the sun, all absorbed by the atmosphere
the atmosphere absorbs X units from the sun, radiates 1/2X to space, 1/2 X to Titan’s surface.

Titan’s surface receives zero units from the sun and 1/2 X from the atmosphere, and radiates 1/2 X back to space ( with the atmosphere transparent to surface radiation).

Gail Combs says May 17, 2013 at 7:15 am
…
The physics that applies to CO2 and earthshine also applies to H2O and sunshine. Therefore if H2O is causing a net warming then CO2 should cause a net cooling.

You did okay until the last sentence; please explain how the two would behave oppositely WHEN the operative LWIR wavelengths are not that far apart for CO2 and H2O.

Question from an uneducated layman; if a parcel of air warms at the surface, it expands, rises, and cools. Where did the absorbed heat energy go? I say it was shared with the cooler air above, not lost at all. I read that nitrogen, oxygen and argon do not radiate at temperatures encountered in the atmosphere. So how does 99.9% of the atmosphere cool down once it has been warmed?

On a ‘micro’ scale –

A. Eventual transport of the ‘parcel’ (with sensible heat expressed as a temperature adjusted for the ‘thinner’ of air existing at a higher altitude) to another locale where it might be forced to descend, or form clouds at existing altitude perhaps even creating a Nimbus (rain) cloud or it might be forced to ascend further (due to real meteorological forcing or orographic lift) where it might form clouds etc.

B. Subsequent mixing with ‘other air’ where the heat energy then becomes ‘shared’ with the mixed-in air, and then onto A. above.

On a really ‘macro’ scale – Given the general circulation of a Hadley (Mid-level etc) cells, eventually all air parcels arrive in more northern (toward the poles) latitudes where the majority of the heat energy gets ‘dumped’ above say about 55 deg (or so) latitude where there is (on average) a net-loss of radiative energy into space, so it becomes important for Hadley, Mid-level and Polar cell circulations to physically transport in ‘warmer’ air masses (parcels) from equatorial and mid-level regions.

Try the mid afternoon in one of the North African or Arabian deserts, for cooling that will grab you.

With surface Temperatures of maybe +60 deg. C (140 deg. F), the radiative cooling rate is about 1.8 times what it is in Ohio nights, and because the desert air is so dry, there isn’t much H2O in the atmosphere, to capture a lot of outgoing LWIR radiation.

Also at those Temperatures, the spectral peak wavelength is more like 8.8 microns, than 10.1 microns, so the 15 micron CO2 absorption band is driven even further away from the peak of the energy spectrum.

Well it may even be less that th 9.6 micron Ozone band which also blocks outgoing LWIR radiation.

The “atmospheric window”, is wide open in those hot daytime desert Temperatures.

Mike Crow — Bravo! Bravo! Well done. Thank you, so much, for so generously sharing all your hard work and for so thoroughly addressing all the questions and in such a graciously humble, warm, style (exactly what is needed in a classroom to promote learning). What a great discussion!

You are a gifted, natural, teacher and one of WUWT’s “Greats”. You know you’ve made it when someone mixes you up with Willis Eschenbach. :)

@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!

And, once again, all to all you Science Giants who weighed in above (and, no doubt, will below, too), thank YOU. I am so blessed to come here and really LEARN.
@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!@!

BTW, F. H. Haynie, “retired researcher,” your web handle was obviously wishful thinking — you are obviously still a fine, ACTIVE, researcher. I doubt that any scholar or sincere researcher ever truly retires, and you are a fine example proving my assertion. Dr. Gray talks of retiring. LOL. Keep up the good work! Science still needs you.

“The data isn’t detailed enough to detect the change and/or there bias due to not homogenizing spacial locations.
As a data specialist (I do this for a living), homogenizing non-linear temps over a linear area is just making up data (and can be shown to be wrong by looking at temp data across a few different local stations, Try Cleveland and the surrounding area), especially when sampling changes over time, and that’s exactly what happened with the temperature record. It’s also why I did the Diff report on the US, as it’s arguably the most sampled area on the planet, to help reduce the bias from not homogenizing the data.”

“On a really ‘macro’ scale – Given the general circulation of a Hadley (Mid-level etc) cells, eventually all air parcels arrive in more northern (toward the poles) latitudes where the majority of the heat energy gets ‘dumped’ above say about 55 deg (or so) latitude where there is (on average) a net-loss of radiative energy into space, so it becomes important for Hadley, Mid-level and Polar cell circulations to physically transport in ‘warmer’ air masses (parcels) from equatorial and mid-level regions.”

Thank you. Does this imply that there is significant broadband LWIR emitted from cloud tops as well as the narrow band LWIR from ‘greenhouse gases’? The process for cooling of non-radiative gasses in the atmosphere has my interest.
(I’ll go read the link now. :-) )

Oh, dear. Bad move. I went and read the link! Once more the bias in Wikipedia shows. Global warming causes increased expansion in Hadley Cells! Really? How is this possible in view of the reports that the top of the atmosphere is lower and water vapour at 300mb level is much reduced?

The difference between Average warming and average cooling is just a fencepost effect and is simply the total change in temperature at the station over the length of the record divided by the number of days. It is not a useful measure (it depends mostly on the dates that the record starts and ends at), and will shrink to zero when the station has a lot of records anyway. Essentially the difference is just noise as far as I can see. At any given station the average warming and the average cooling as you have defined them must be more or less equal or else the station would be heating up or cooling down.

” Essentially the difference is just noise as far as I can see. At any given station the average warming and the average cooling as you have defined them must be more or less equal or else the station would be heating up or cooling down.

Are you sure you are not just graphing noise?

Help me out. Am I going nuts here? What have I not understood?”

Its the difference in temp from one day to the next. Over a year since the temp should return to its starting point it should be zero, unless for some reason the temp is going up.
I do include logic to make sure any station included has at least 240 days 50-60 years of data depending on what range I’m looking at. But also look at the daily diff, even if you don’t like the yearly avg, from it you can see the temp response to changing length of day.

Our measurements at meteoLCD show an essential flat trend in Tmax, Tmin and DTR for Diekirch, Luxembourg during the last 11 years. This is in accordance with the BEST paper (referenced on the linked page). Now night-time warming here!

Mike Crow says
Since recorded Min Max temperatures show no sign of a loss of cooling on a daily basis since at least 1950, even if CO2 has increased the amount of DLR, something else(most likely variablity of clouds) is controlling temperatures. This would seem to eliminate CO2 as the main cause of late 20th century warming.

henry says
good analysis.
essentially I did something similar by looking at the rates of changes on the maxima and minima, over time,
.I just took a sample of 47 weather stations, analysed all daily data, and determined the ratio of the speed in the increase of the maximum temperature (maxima), means and minima. Here you can see the results.

You will find that if we take the speed of warming over the longest period (i.e. from 1973/1974) for which we have very reliable records, we find the results of the speed of warming, maxima : means: minima

0.036 : 0.014 : 0.006 in degrees C/annum.

That is ca. 6:2:1. So it was maxima pushing up minima and means and not the other way around. Anyone can duplicate this experiment and check this trend in their own backyard or at the weather station nearest to you.

Interestingly, the few places where I did find minima rising faster, was in places like Las Vegas, which was turned from a desert to an oasis almost overnight. Where I found minima falling fastest, was in places like Tandil in Argentinia, apparently due to the de-forestation…..
So vegetation traps heat!!

A word of advice to the statisticians here:
normally in stats, if you have missing data, you would fill in the long term average.
Initially I applied this rule, but eventually I found out that that was a mistake, if you want to study climate change……
Here is what I did:
If a month’s data was found missing or if I found that the average for a month was based on less than 15 days of that month’s data, I looked at the average temperatures of that month of the preceding- and following year, averaged these, and in this way estimated the temperatures of that particular month’s missing data.

You will find that if we take the speed of warming over the longest period (i.e. from 1973/1974) for which we have very reliable records, we find the results of the speed of warming, maxima : means: minima

0.036 : 0.014 : 0.006 in degrees C/annum.”

Fascinating! I think you have discovered a way to distinguish warming due to the sun, or other extraneous factors, from warming due to the greenhouse effect.
If the warming is due to the sun, or other extraneous factors,
Tmax – Tmin should remain the same, or be increasing over time.
If the warming is due to greenhouse gases, and NOT the sun or other factors
Tmax – Tmin should be DECREASING over time.

” if the warming is due to the sun, or other extraneous factors, Tmax – Tmin should remain the same, or be increasing over time. If the warming is due to greenhouse gases, and NOT the sun or other factors Tmax – Tmin should be DECREASING over time.”

HenryP’s t-max – t-min is the same as my Rising temp, and it seems remarkedly stable over time.

Allan says
Fascinating! I think you have discovered a way to distinguish warming due to the sun, or other extraneous factors, from warming due to the greenhouse effect.
Henry@Alan
well…ehhh….no, so sorry,
it does not work like that because as you can see from the tables,

it started cooling naturally over the past 18 years, as seen from the drop in maxima (from the sun).

I was using both of your ( Henry P and MiCro) analyses and jumping to the sun/greenhouse gas conclusion
using mathematics,
For the earth, we get an average of 480 watts from the sun and 250 watts from the atmosphere during the day, when it is warming, and get 0 watts from the sun and 250 watts from the atmosphere at night, when it is cooling.

Suppose there’s a change in temp due solely to greenhouse gases, say an increase to 300 wats.
Then the earth will be receiving an average 480 watts from the sun and 300 from the atmosphere during the daytime, and 300 from the atmosphere during the nighttime.
Temperature is proportional to the 4th root of wattage, the ratio of
(480 + 250)//(250 is greater than (480 + 300)/(300) so as the the ratio between daytime highs and nighttime lows should drop with an increased greenhouse effect, rise with at decreased greenhouse effect.

If it;s the sun, changes in temperature of the sun can effect the distribution of the sun;s spectrum, and the fraction of sunlight reflected, absorbed by the atmosphere, and hitting the earth’s surface. To simplify, letting the sun’s temperature stay the same, but letting
it’s luminosity increase- I suppose the greenhouse magnifier would act proportionally the same as it does now.
With a 5% incrrease in the sun’s luminosity, wed get 1.05 times 480 watts from the sun during the day, 1.05 times 250 watts from the atmosphere both during the day and during the night, ,
and the RATIO of day to nighttime temps would stay the same, but with ABSOLuTE warming, the
DIFFERENCE between day and nighttime temps should INCREASE with increased solar luminosity

Likewise, a DROP in greenhouse gases would lead to an INCREASE in the day/night temperature differential, along with decreased overall temperatures and a drop in solar activity would result in a DECREASE in the day/night differential with an overall decrease in temperatures.

Henry@Alan
In maths and physics things usually work out the way you “calculate” things,
in chemistry you never know exactly which way things go…..you cannot “calculate” that which has never been measured before. So you have to measure first.

From my own results, I figured that there must be a small window at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) that gets opened and closed a bit, every so often. Chemists know that a lot of incoming radiation is deflected to space by the ozone and the peroxides and nitrous oxides lying at the TOA. These chemicals are manufactured from the UV coming from the sun. Luckily we do have measurements on ozone, from stations in both hemispheres. I looked at these results. Incredibly, I found that ozone started going down around 1951 and started going up again in 1995, both on the NH and the SH. Percentage wise the increase in ozone in the SH since 1995 is much more spectacular.

Trenberth’s missing energy is probably in the peroxides and nitric oxides which he never even mentioned in his reports, probably because we could not measure them.

With the ozone results, I have now found three confirmations for the dates of the turning points of my A-C wave for energy-in. The mechanism? We know that there is not much variation in the total solar irradiation (TSI) measured at the TOA. However, there is some variation within TSI, mainly to do with the E-UV. Most likely there is some gravitational- and/or electromagnetic force that gets switched every 44 year, affecting the sun’s output of E-UV. It is part of creation. Otherwise there could be run away warming and probably no weather (rain!) at all, making life impossible…..

What earth does does with the incoming energy may lag a bit, creating different, but very predictable weather cycles.

Just remember: It really was very cold in 1940′s….The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 (due to a change in the direction of the winds) was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world. Three million people left their farms on the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml

Danger from global cooling is documented and provable. It looks we have only ca. 7 “fat” years left (2013 – 88 = 1925), probably even less.

MiCro says
@HenryP, see if the 10yr running avg of slope fits your 44yr cycle
Henry@Micro
I cannot do that with my results from the table, as in effect, in the end, I only have 4 points on a line, to make my evaluation …. not a guess.
I can do it for a certain station. But that has no “global” value….
I did it with the CET maxima results, going back to 1900.
I find same cycle back but it is running exactly opposite my wave.
I think I figured out why.
It is called the GH effect.
As the temperature differential between the poles and equator grows larger due to the cooling from the top, very likely something will also change on earth. Predictably, there would be a small (?) shift of cloud formation and precipitation, more towards the equator, on average. At the equator insolation is 684 W/m2 whereas on average it is 342 W/m2. So, if there are more clouds in and around the equator, this will amplify the cooling effect due to less direct natural insolation of earth (clouds deflect a lot of radiation).
So, apparently, if it the range of data runs opposite the wave it must be to do with cloud formation.

Richard111 says May 18, 2013 at 12:01 am3 at 5:41 pm
…
Thank you. Does this imply that there is significant broadband LWIR emitted from cloud tops

Not that I am aware of (the effect is small, though non-zero!); In meteorology, IR ‘radiation’ from the surface dominates … the axiom in meteo goes: “air masses assume the characteristics of the land masses they spend time over.”

Since only H2O (WV) and CO2 have pronounced “dipole moments” (O2 and N2 do not) (think back to physics about torque, moments and angular momentum analysis) they are the only ones that emit EM (Electro Magnetic) energy when they ‘wiggle’ (actually, sometimes complex vibration and oscillatory ‘modes’ of movement of one atom WRT to the other(s) in the molecule) since the atoms ‘expose’ to the outside world some measure of their natural ‘charge’ (electric charge).

From Maxwell et al, we know that moving charges produce some amount of EM that may be ‘radiated’ (transmitted, emitted, generates ‘photons’ if you prefer) from the wire, conductor or in this case a ‘wiggling’ molecule with an intrinsic dipole (that is two pol, both “+” and “-“) moment.

” or in this case a ‘wiggling’ molecule with an intrinsic dipole (that is two pol, both “+” and “-”) moment.”

So, can I presume that different wiggles are responsible for specific wavelength absorptions, and radiation?
Photons greater than 10u are pretty low energy, 1 hour of .5u solar energy at some flux, should take 20 hrs at the same flux rate to radiate.
Wouldn’t this limit the flux at 10+u to one photon per molecule?

Hi Mike, I’ve been busy and only just looked at this thread, so I’ m late as usual. Thank you. Your study fascinates me as this is what has been perplexing me for some years. I have found no decrease in DTR in Australia for the past 60 years (actually a slow decrease to the late 1980s followed by a sharp increase), no greater increase in winter warming than summer warming since 1910, with winters cooling in the satellite era.http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/australia-the-missing-fingerprints-of-greenhouse-warming/
I have been tracking day to day differences and second differences- essentially acceleration/deceleration- of daily minima, as well, because these tend to follow regular patterns. The effect of humidity and cloud cover on intra- day temperature change is blindingly obvious, but it has never occurred to me to look more closely at the intra-day cooling / warming. (The difference appears to be inter-day Tmin difference- am I wrong?) So thank you- you have inspired me to look deeper.

People who think the atmosphere makes the planet colder and that the drive of that cooling is large have good points.

The atmosphere is heated by infrared but the earth by many more spectra therefore raw atmosphere temp vs raw earth temp will always be dramatically different.

Basically the earth is an internally warmed, and externally warmed, solid object, spinning at the bottom of an ocean of frigid gas. The gas is a fluid and pulled against the surface, air molecules take heat from the surface which absorbed light from blue, (high energy) through green, yellow, orange, red light (low energy)
and the earth giving that off is what the earth’s total energy would be without the gas.

Obviously the gas is doing nothing but cooling.

=====
Immediately following that is analysis of what is cooling the most.

The oceans are water, a greenhouse gas. The oceanic basin covers some 50 + percent of the globe.
That oceanic basin is all blue. It’s very blue, and everyone knows the color you see is the color that object is kicking back. Not absorbing.

So if the earth were exposed without oceans of water the sunlight would be, being trapped just like in the desert or forest. Those places aren’t blue. They absorb much, much more light energy.

So those oceans are directly – not indirectly somehow – directly responsible for kicking back many many times more heat than if they weren’t there in liquid phase.

Then there’s the other 25% or whatever of the earth covered in cloud, or snow, or ice.

Snow is white: kicking back all spectra evenly. Kicking back much more light energy than ground below would, if it could get the full sunlight load.
The tops of clouds are white: kicking back much more light than their bottoms, anytime the sun hits them. Everyone knows the load intensity from the sun side is much higher than from the ground side: so every time there’s a cloud in sunlight, it’s blocking light getting into the planet a lot more, than anything it’s blocking, getting out. The ground doesn’t emit white light: it’s energy is so low that just a few u over, at 20 u, is where commercial infrared sensing starts getting more expensive because there’s simply not enough energy in it to disturb sensors’ thermal/photo inertia.: the light’s just too weak.

Ice, is blue: it also, kicks back much more energy than any substrate below it, because it’s very color defines it as, kicking back much more energy than a darker substrate ever would.

=====
Then, there is the refrigerative cycling the water does, to make that snow: to make those clouds. The storm system kicks massive amounts of heat up away from the earth that otherwise would be depending on the convective characteristics of oxygen and nitrogen.

Plus there’s the augmentation effect involving the movement of the nitrogen and oxygen themselves: hastening their mixing therefore their ability to remove heat from the surface.

All that – driven by water – and someone wants to make the claim, they believe water and CO2 are the heaters of the atmosphere?

Oh there’s the additional effect water and CO2 have as reflecting infrared out before it gets to earth, when they’re not in the storm cell configuration. Together they block some 25% of the sun’s energy before it even has an opportunity to GET to the surface.

Before it has an opportunity to GET kicked back by the ocean,
before it has an opportunity to GET kicked back by snow, by lower level cloud tops;
before it has an opportunity to GET kicked back by ice,
before it has an opportunity to GET kicked back by the storm cell system.

So exactly where is this warming signature that everyone must know, is creating a warming of the earth? In all that cooling, where is it?

=====
N.A.S.A. and N.O.A.A. we know, admit, that CO2 is cooling the upper atmosphere.

Yet there’s someone after all this cooling who has the idea that water, and CO2 are responsible for warming the earth?

Water warms the atmosphere some by enhancing nitrogen/oxygen contact hence conduction, cooling the earth further.

So there’s claim that after all the above kicking back of energy,
there’s some extremely low energy – it is, extremely low, just go look at the energy in the light spectrum, it’s easy to find. If I find it someone will be claiming I’m cherry picking.

There’s some extremely low energy light leaving the earth that’s being pinged back by contact with water and CO2, but it’s just a simple fact that, as long as there’s sunlight, impinging on that particular gas column under analysis at any given moment, that gas, is blocking infrared light, a lot more from the sun side,
than it’s blocking from the earth side,
because it’s just a simple fact the sun side is much, much more energy dense, anywhere it’s impinging on the atmosphere.

So there’s the visible light we see coming off the sides of clouds, that otherwise would just pass on through the atmosphere out the other side,

there’s the heat the falling ice in the water refrigeration cycle picks up on the way back down each cycle making it land as rain: that heat comes back down –

and there’s the occasional pingbacks from energy headed out, but that infrared light coming back to earth.

If it were an amount of feedback anyone could accurately measure and verify like real science does, and is trying to do, someone would have done so, and we would agree we all, some 70 or 80 or 90 percent of us, would agree: that’s it.

No one’s going to tie more light getting to the earth, to the class of gases that are the only ones to BLOCK light getting to the earth.
That statement’s made in conjunction with the evident knowlege that the fact all those oceanic basins are kicking back so much blue light, that the planet’s CALLED – the blue planet.

With the knowledge of the refrigeration cycle water is responsible for; with the knowledge that everywhere sunlight falls on water in any phase at all, the amount of light kicked out, is more, and by quite a bit.

This can only be, a cooling: and the warming done, even at night: amounts to pretty much whatever falls in rain, or is impeded by clouds, or the other, already mentioned means.

And I really am surprised people say they think water and CO2, warm the earth.

What I’m really surprised to see as well, is people having the concept the atmosphere is a warming device. The atmosphere is a heat conductive mass, that’s transparent to incoming light pretty much and is therefore as cold as your ex’s lawyer’s heart.

When you want to bring the temperature at which an object ejects heat up, you put it into a vacuum: so that conduction and it’s adjunct convection can’t cool the object. Indeed the primary cooling fluid of all mankind’s machinery is atmospheric air.

When you have X atmospheric air molecules striking a warm object, you can remove a certain amount of heat.
The directly sought and achieved effect of hitting objects with fanned air is further conduction, due to an increased number of contacts with atmospheric air mix, and that object.

The earth’s surface is cooled in an identical way, as nitrogen and oxygen and water and CO2 as a mix, contact the surface, and heat.

If that atmospheric mix wasn’t here, the compounds comprising the substrate, would radiate, at a higher temperature than if that atmosphere wasn’t there.

Why do you think automobile radiators must receive air flow, to cool effectively? Because if you mount the radiator in the rear of that vehicle where there’s a high degree of vacuum relative to that compressed bow wave of air, the radiator doesn’t cool as well.

This is auto shop level heat management. In the deep cold winter of Minnesota you put cardboard in front of a radiator, to stop freezing air molecules from striking your radiative surfaces, your fins on your radiator.

So anyone can gush and snort about the magnificence of the hotness water and CO2 bring, but as everyone knows, people who believe the atmosphere is a heater, when it’s actually a giant frigid gas fluid bath, the marble of the globe is spinning at the bottom of, having the gas pulled conductively against the surface by gravity – further slammed into it by the earth’s rotational speed –

everyone knows, these people can not tell you where the temperature is headed most of the time. Their models never work, their predictions are something we collectively laugh at.

So… it just doesn’t sound like people studying a frigid fluid miles-deep bath, that’s being underlain by a 55% oceanic coverage with working phase change refrigeration going on.

It just sounds like someone’s been hitting the bubbly to talk about how ‘hot’ the atmosphere’s going to make everything, because there’s a lot more cooling going on,

espectially by water and also by CO2

than any demonstrable heating: and indeed, any theoretical heating. People laugh outright at the warmist’s energy budgets. More energy leaving an entity than comes in? What?? LoL.

It’s a shame, really, to watch people the world over, intimidated into talking about a giant frigid fluid bath as a heater. It really is sad to see, and I’ll bet there are a whole lot of people who study thermal handling of materials who feel the same way.

There are no industries where light is talked about as darkness, or more pressure is called less pressure, or where more rigidity is called flexibility, just because people in Academia tell them, they’re too stupid to talk about it the straight way.

It’s just a shame. I have been studyiing this now for about a year and I can not believe the state of climate analysis and the purely infantile assertions I see being made by people in the various arms of the several fields, associated with it.

People need to insist that the entire thing be discussed in appropriate terms or it’s always going to remain as it is: ScamLand.

I should add that the fact of a vacuum around earth allowing a deeper chill, isn’t the question, because it’s pretty obvious that’s the case. Point is, a frigid fluid bath’s design is that, it cools, when the power is applied. In other words when the power of sunlight lands on a region, it’s the deep chill of the atmosphere which matters, because it’s presence there stops the warming.

Limiting the warming is the driver that creates limitation of cooling.

So when people try to say ‘what’s the difference,’ one causes the other. Claiming to not see the difference is like claiming buggies push horses and speaking that way all the time since sometimes, going downhill, buggies DO push horses.

MiCro says May 18, 2013 at 6:38 pm
…
So, can I presume that different wiggles are responsible for specific wavelength absorptions, and radiation?

That would be correct; different ‘resonance’ modes (like a quartz crystal (resonator or frequency determining element) can be ‘cut’ for different resonance modes.)

Photons greater than 10u are pretty low energy

Doesn’t make sense in ‘my world’; let’s speak of EM (Electro Magnetic) energy instead, where the magnitude of a particular wavelength (bearing in mind spectrum broadening of ‘line’ spectra is by repeated collisions with other molecules) makes more sense to an RF practitioner like myself.

As to the balance of the question, I don’t know right off hand what the ‘radiative efficiency’ is of the various EM-active (dipole-moment possessing) molecules are … one might presume like any ‘tuned’ resonator of finite Q (whether intrinsic Q or loaded Q) once excited the energy bleed-off (dissipation or ‘radiated’ strength in this case) is Gaussian curve amplitude-weighted WRT time.

” if the warming is due to the sun, or other extraneous factors, Tmax – Tmin should remain the same, or be increasing over time. If the warming is due to greenhouse gases, and NOT the sun or other factors Tmax – Tmin should be DECREASING over time.”

“HenryP’s t-max – t-min is the same as my Rising temp, and it seems remarkedly stable over time.”

What and HenryP have demonstrated, if your figures are correct, is that current warming has nothing to do with a hypothetical increased greenhouse effect and positive water vapor feedback. Something else, like the sun, or tidal cycles due to changes in the moons orbit, or delayed feedback from ocean current flow, must be the major cause of warming.

If temps were increasing solely because of the increased CO2 greenhouse effect, overall warming would be less in the daytime than at night. The Tmin would be greater than the Tmax increase.

If there was POSITIVE water vapor feedback, more water vapor would be evaporated during the day, increasing the latent heat flux due to evaporation more than the sensible heat flux causing Tmax increases. At night, we’d hit the condensation level at a higher temp, and Tmin would increase . I suspect that there would be an even bigger decrease in Tmax-Tmin difference with water vapor feedback than with CO2 alone.

Maybe one should ask a question that has not been reasonably considered as a factor: What has the barometric pressure been doing over the same time period since 1940 to present? Does it correspond to the GAT?

Pressure and temperature form a calculable relationship as we have seen in Venus’s atmospheric pressure temperature profile of the air column. We know that the earth’s atmosphere expands in height. PV = nRT

Kelvin Vaughan says 18th May at 1 03 am
Keith do you have data on a web page?

Hi Kelvin, no is the answer. I have taken readings locally for 40+ years, all are logged on my computer with graphs etc. That’s why I think there is an untapped source of information out there for when the official records get too far from reality. If there is a way you can contact me i.e I am happy to let Anthony supply my email to you, I am not sure otherwise how we go about personal contact. By the way sorry for the delay in replying yesterday was a write off from blogging.

Doesn’t make sense in ‘my world’; let’s speak of EM (Electro Magnetic) energy instead, where the magnitude of a particular wavelength (bearing in mind spectrum broadening of ‘line’ spectra is by repeated collisions with other molecules) makes more sense to an RF practitioner like myself.

This is probably more important in matters such as radio transmission where there’s lots and lots of photons being radiated. I’m thinking more about single photons where E = hf where f is frequency and h is Planck’s constant. So I think one thermalized .5u photon would radiate out as 20 10u photons.

As to the balance of the question, I don’t know right off hand what the ‘radiative efficiency’ is of the various EM-active (dipole-moment possessing) molecules are … one might presume like any ‘tuned’ resonator of finite Q (whether intrinsic Q or loaded Q) once excited the energy bleed-off (dissipation or ‘radiated’ strength in this case) is Gaussian curve amplitude-weighted WRT time.

I don’t know enough to agree or not, I do know when collecting single photons during deep space astrophotography they come in with a Poisson distribution, but that’s not to say they aren’t emited as a Gaussian.

What and HenryP have demonstrated, if your figures are correct, is that current warming has nothing to do with a hypothetical increased greenhouse effect and positive water vapor feedback. Something else, like the sun, or tidal cycles due to changes in the moons orbit, or delayed feedback from ocean current flow, must be the major cause of warming.

This is my take on the data, there’s no sign of a Co2 signal in the cooling data.

If you can measure DLR someplace/time when the humidity is really low with a IR thermometer, it seems that it’s much colder than one might think. On a clear 35F day it was ~-40F, So even if climate sensitivity is 2C, it’d be -36.4, still a pretty cold sink to radiate to. And if nightly cooling is regulated by say clouds, doubling of Co2 might not have much effect.